"Thus, gentle Reader, myselfe am the groundworke of my booke"

January 26, 2017 3:10 AM

"Que sais-je?" "What do I know?" was Montaigne's beloved motto, meaning: What do I really know? And what do we really know about him now? We may vaguely know that he was the first essayist, that he retreated from the world into a tower on the family estate to think and reflect, and that he wrote about cannibals (for them) and about cruelty (against it).

–Montaigne on Trial by Adam Gopnik, an essay on a recent biography of the 16th Century philosopher who was first translated into English in 1603 by John Florio.
posted by Kattullus (22 comments total)

For a more recent translation, Project Gutenberg has Charles Cotton's 1877 version. Montaigne was, as is touched on in Gopnik's essay, probably read by Shakespeare. Furthermore, Florio is a good candidate for being the editor who prepared the First Folio containing Shakespeare's works for publication.
posted by Kattullus at 3:13 AM on January 26, 2017

Gopnik's last couple of paragraphs ring true. When I read the Cohen translation of Montaigne's (selected) essays in 2003 I wrote in my blog that "the remarkable thing ... is how modern they seem. It helps to read a relatively recent translation (which is why I haven't linked to the Cotton one at Project Gutenberg), but it's not just that; Montaigne's 16th century outlook is surprisingly close to our own. (An exception is the scant attention or regard he pays to women.) Reading 'On Cannibals' is like hearing from a time traveller who just dropped in on Cortez."

I remember suggesting at the Blogroots site at the time that Montaigne was the ur-blogger - these passages will seem familiar to anyone who's ever succumbed to the blogging urge. I had plans at the time to tackle the complete essays and blog the journey, to complete the circle, but it went the way of so many blog-project plans...

(It's a shame that Blogroots is so hard to revisit nowadays, or I'd find the thread and link it. It was effectively a spinoff of MetaTalk, after mathowie, megnut and pb had published their book We Blog; all MeFi discussion of blogging was then directed over there. But after a couple of years the site was shuttered, taking with it some valuable discussion of blogging from its early years. It's at archive.org, but not very searchable.)
posted by rory at 4:09 AM on January 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

What do I really know?

Philosophy's gaslighting, down through the ages. Demand that knowledge be absolutely 100% certainly objectively shown to be true, which means, you know nothing, or, maybe, math. Then berate the "skeptic" who refuses to believe in Reason.
posted by thelonius at 4:17 AM on January 26, 2017

I never thought the hot topic of 2017 would be epistemology. Huh. And there I was laughing at all the philosophy majors.
posted by kariebookish at 4:25 AM on January 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

I need some help here. Lots of folks in my circles have been saying I need to read Montaigne. I have read one book, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. I'm really struggling to get over my biases. Montaigne was an wealthy aristocrat who left all the day to day management decisions to his wife and mother. Basically, he was an charming slacker rich dude living off other peoples hard work. How his any of thinking relevant to my or most other people's lives?
posted by KaizenSoze at 5:26 AM on January 26, 2017

Basically, he was an charming slacker rich dude living off other peoples hard work. How his any of thinking relevant to my or most other people's lives?

Because he thought and wrote about issues like friendship, death, sleep, fear, and other universals of human experience, and he did so with intelligence and honesty. Parts of the human experience are inescapable regardless of wealth or position, and those were the parts that fascinated Montaigne. Often people reading him feel a strange recognition. Even when you disagree with him, it's fascinating to see how his mind worked.
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 5:53 AM on January 26, 2017 [11 favorites]

If he hadn't been wealthy and hadn't had day-to-day help he wouldn't have had any time (or possibly even the literacy) to write, so we wouldn't even be talking about him. (Which is one reason the voices of the poor and women are so under-represented in historical accounts.) Once you get past that, though, the essays themselves are fascinating. Just try some. The Screech translation is good; Cohen's is okay.
posted by rory at 5:53 AM on January 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Sarah Bakewell's "How To Live" is an acute analysis of the life of Montaigne, helping at least this reader think about the historical and religious context in which the essays were written. I think Donald Frame's translation is marvelous, and I prefer it to the others I've read. It's important to understand that the essays were written, rewritten, and extensively expanded over a period of twenty years; during this period Montaigne's fellow Frenchmen were periodically engaged in killing each other over religious differences which seem trivial now.
posted by Agave at 6:53 AM on January 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

Oh, and by the way, Gopnik's essay/review pleased me greatly.
posted by Agave at 6:54 AM on January 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Basically, he was an charming slacker rich dude living off other peoples hard work. How his any of thinking relevant to my or most other people's lives?

So was Marcus Aurelius. It doesn't make his work completely worthless.

Chaque homme porte la forme entière de l'humaine condition - one of my favourite sentences.
posted by nicolin at 7:00 AM on January 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

An Apology for Raymond Sebond is widely regarded as the greatest of Montaigne’s essays: a supremely eloquent expression of Christian scepticism. An empassioned defence of Sebond’s fifteenth-century treatise on natural theology, it was inspired by the deep crisis of personal melancholy that followed the death of Montaigne’s own father in 1568, and explores contemporary Christianity in prose that is witty and frequently damning. As he searches for the true meaning of faith, Montaigne is heavily critical of the arrogant tendency of mankind to create God in its own image, and offers his personal reflections on the true role of man, the need to eschew personal arrogance, and the vital importance of faith if we are to understand our place in the universe. Wise, perceptive and remarkably informed, this is one of the true masterpieces of the essay form. [quoted from: here]
posted by Postroad at 7:20 AM on January 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Montaigne's dad invents Craigslist:

My late father, a man that had no other advantages than experience and his own natural parts, was nevertheless of a very clear judgment, formerly told me that he once had thoughts of endeavouring to introduce this practice; that there might be in every city a certain place assigned to which such as stood in need of anything might repair, and have their business entered by an officer appointed for that purpose. As for example: I want a chapman to buy my pearls; I want one that has pearls to sell; such a one wants company to go to Paris; such a one seeks a servant of such a quality; such a one a master; such a one such an artificer; some inquiring for one thing, some for another, every one according to what he wants. And doubtless, these mutual advertisements would be of no contemptible advantage to the public correspondence and intelligence: for there are evermore conditions that hunt after one another, and for want of knowing one another’s occasions leave men in very great necessity.

posted by Iridic at 7:56 AM on January 26, 2017 [6 favorites]

If you rule out reading authors on the basis of their having been privileged parasites on the labor of others, you're essentially dismissing all of pre- and early modern civilization out of hand. I would gently suggest that one needs more nuanced principles as a basis for discrimination. Unless you're really committed to being that radical, which honestly I would respect but I think turns out to be unsustainable for most.
posted by praemunire at 9:02 AM on January 26, 2017 [5 favorites]

Harvey Jerkwater
Because he thought and wrote about issues like friendship, death, sleep, fear, and other universals of human experience, and he did so with intelligence and honesty. Parts of the human experience are inescapable regardless of wealth or position, and those were the parts that fascinated Montaigne. Often people reading him feel a strange recognition. Even when you disagree with him, it's fascinating to see how his mind worked.


That makes more sense. Thank you.


nicolin:
So was Marcus Aurelius. It doesn't make his work completely worthless.


Aurelius was the emperor of Rome. He was making life and death decisions for people everyday. It sounds like he was constantly harried by people needing those important decisions. He did not turn all the day to day work over to other people.

I could be convinced otherwise but I do not think they are comparable.
posted by KaizenSoze at 9:10 AM on January 26, 2017

It sounds like he was constantly harried by people needing those important decisions.

Sounds like Montaigne, when he was mayor, was also harried: "When Montaigne tells us that his library is where “I pass the greatest part of my live days and wear out most hours of the days,” he was being poetical. The pieces were, it now seems, far more often dictated on the run than written in that tower, dictation being the era’s more aristocratic, less artisanal method of composition."
posted by kenko at 12:27 PM on January 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Man, though, Adam Gopnik is all flash and phraseology, isn't he?
posted by kenko at 12:28 PM on January 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Basically, he was an charming slacker rich dude living off other peoples hard work. How his any of thinking relevant to my or most other people's lives?

Because he thought and wrote about issues like friendship, death, sleep, fear, and other universals of human experience, and he did so with intelligence and honesty.

I don't take him with salt because I think he was bad for living on the cream of the cream; I take him with salt because, in avoiding some of life's major constraints, one is proportionally ignorant of life. (This is hard to miss as a woman reading Montaigne.)
posted by clew at 2:49 PM on January 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

I lik the cannibal
posted by rhizome at 6:26 PM on January 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Montaigne probably did more honest practical labor in his life than 85% of the public pontificators we are blessed with now. Not because he was a better person, but because it was just harder to dodge labor in the early modern period than it is now.
posted by praemunire at 8:10 PM on January 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Man, though, Adam Gopnik is all flash and phraseology, isn't he?

No.

No, he's not.
posted by Mister Bijou at 4:13 AM on January 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Mister Bijou, this is the sort of thing I meant:

At the same time, Desan suffers some from the curse of the archives, which is to believe that the archives are the place where art is born, instead of where it goes to be buried. The point of the necklaces, for him, is to show that Montaigne rose from a background of bribes and payoffs; he doesn’t see that we care about the necklaces only because one hung on Montaigne.

What in the world does this mean, and why has Gopnik said it?

First, Desan is writing a biography and may or may not conceive of himself as an archivist at all.

Second, Desan presumably does see that, because he's writing about Montaigne, inne? In which context Montaigne's having arisen from a background of bribes is relevant information worth including, unless you think it's utterly pointless to care about Montaigne's biography at all and just be content with the essays as if they sprang from no human pen. (Not a totally unreasonable position, I think, but if that's what you think, you may as well say so up front and then not bother with the biography's specifics.)

Third, Gopnik proposes no alternate point to the necklace—I don't think the auratic "this was Montaigne's Necklace, ooooo" counts—so I have no idea what he thinks we care about, when we care about the necklaces because one hung on Montaigne. Maybe it is just the caring that someone might exhibit toward a putative sacred relic or whatever. That strikes me as very shallow, especially for someone who purports to be a critic. (Cf. Friedrich Schlegel: "If some mystical art lovers who think of every criticism as a dissection and every dissection as a destruction of pleasure were to think logically, then "wow" would be the best criticism of the greatest work of art.")

Fourth, of course archives can be the birthplace of art. Though, again, it's very unclear just what Gopnik intends to deny, when he denies that. And while I can think of a prosaic meaning to assign to "archives are where art goes to be buried" (the stuff people stop looking at gets archived, except also other stuff gets archived so that didn't really work out so hot, come to think of it), I can't think of an interesting or insightful one.
posted by kenko at 10:43 PM on January 29, 2017 [2 favorites]

(Possibly the thing we're supposed to get out of the "curse of the archives" is that Desan believes that he can unearth how Montaigne's art was born from the archives. That makes the pendant claim somewhat nonsensical—does Gopnik contend, contrariwise, that Desan really could have unearthed how Montaigne's or another's art died from the archives?—but by itself it makes a little more sense. But that presumes that that Desan is out to explain the origins of Montaigne's art, and from Gopnik's own summary of the book, it sounds like he has a superficially similar but actually different goal, that of explaining why Montaigne wrote about the present, why he took such and such actions in the world, all of which can sit side by side with an analysis of the art with which the essays are constructed.)
posted by kenko at 10:46 PM on January 29, 2017 [1 favorite]